Wednesday, April 28, 2004

Creative Crossings

The two-day Creative Crossings workshop in which I have been participating has summed up with the following research and collaboration agendas (rough notes) :

Group 1 - Participatory strategies: social networking

practices & roles / values & ethics / visions & methods

how to design for unintended use/creative misuse? how can you design a platform that evolves? what is the moderating role of the practitioner? how can the practitioner negotiate multiple contexts?

how do we establish appropriate boundaries or parameters for participation? how do we establish mutual agreements or common understandings while respecting diversity? what are the appropriate forms of explicit agreements? how do we influence "external" institutions and contexts? what are the values that practitioners should cultivate? what are the responsibilities of practitioners? What are the values implicit in code and software?

what methods can artists use for engaging communities? how can we design for sustainability? how can we evaluate our products and process? what do we mean by participatory design? how can we link artistic, design and research methods? what is the role of time in participatory research?

Group 2 - Media strategies: cross-platform user modes

Need to develop a grammar of critical language and a set of descriptors that define the experience of live data (the middle space: temporal and content and context that might be within specific locations)

Pointed to 2 areas : theories of time & understandings of embodiment and hybrid cultural data ranging from advertising, performance and architecture

This is necessary because we are collectively moving into mobile trans-disciplinary, cross platform practice

Group 3 - Metadata strategies: access, mapping & ontologies

Using metadata and ontologies in authoring and designing public space
- how to construct metada and ontologies for mobile culture
- how to bind together location, movement and temporality

How is a location meaningful when entry of data takes place from multiple locations and temporalities
- seeking p2p presence
- metadata/ontologies in making individual clients relevant to one another

Interface solutions for authoring interactive environments and narratives that pay attentions to the conditions of mobility
- issues of agency as one moves through public space equipped with varying types of mobile media: crossing different cultural domains
- agency as the mode in which one engages with a system
- multiple points of view and their representation
- ethographic research of spatial ontologies and cross cultural engagement and environment design

How do we create self organising ontologies for community / user driven metadata
- value systems for filtering
- trust based local information collection and interaction with particular communities, subcultures, etc.

How do we treat the representation of self in mobile space
- setting personal filters
- how do we link trusted networks
- underline the specificity of public spaces and personal perceptions of that space
- dodgeball.com/social/
- how individuals perform with data objects for example narratives: mark particular objects or points as important, when you put this data together, metadata emerges as a sort of concensus

What are the strategies for engaging communities or user groups in the use of metadata to author content
- user feedback to influence the entire system
- user feedback particular to one individual
- formalising some of the transactions
- sharemyworld.net
- limits on expression when entering personal stories/data